The word itself is important. Distraction. It seems like it comes unbidden from somewhere outside of the normal noise of my daily thoughts – below, above, I don’t know – but I don’t think about the activity, and decide on the world “distraction” – it’s already there.

I used to go through long, involved thought exercises, trying to distill out exactly why I was fixated on this idea – distraction – an idea that feels powerful and important to me, but also has been difficult to nail down, to keep in place long enough to actually understand and form an opinion worthy of action on.

Having had difficulty defining what I’m really talking about, all I can do to give it shape is to work backward from practical examples and hope something meaningful appears:

Some things are less clear. Cleaning the garage? Maybe a distraction. Reading a book? Harder to say, but probably not a distraction. Going for a walk? Watching a good movie? Somehow, in spite of my judgement of TV, watching a movie often, is not condemned as “distraction”.

Going for a run? Writing? Working? Decidedly not distractions.

What about the term I seem to have chosen to describe these things?

distraction

I was reminded of this thought a few days ago when my brother referred to something as “indulgence”. Indulgence and distraction have something in common – both can only exist in the face of a larger goal. You indulge in something as a respite from what you’ve identified to be your true goal, your true direction.

Distraction, similarly, can only exist against the backdrop of a larger goal, a greater purpose, or _something_ demanding our attention.

With this in mind, what is the common thread between the activities I deem “distraction”? Does it even make sense, or is it just an unexamined artifact from youth, or popular culture? Does it have any value as a concept?

My best guess is that I’ll deem anything a distraction that does not have any benefit beyond the moments that I’m engaged in the activity. Watching a funny TV show can be enjoyable, but there’s rarely a lasting benefit. Eating junk food is great in the moments when the food is in your mouth, and terrible immediately after. Facebook… Oh facebook.

On the other hand, cleaning the garage is valuable for a period of time, or at least until it’s messy again. Going for a run is exercise, and much of the benefit comes after the period you spend in the activity. Reading a good book can help you understand yourself, or the world, a bit better. Working earns money, to be used later.

Essentially, the common thread seems to be delayed gratification. I’ve decided, on some level, that delayed gratification is good, and instant gratification, at least instant gratification without any lasting (positive) effect, is bad.

Back to the term. distraction. If the practical common thread is about lasting benefit, what can be extrapolated from the term _distraction_? With this criteria, one would call these activities distractions from the _real goal_, which would have to be constant, incessant, improvement. Or, to take values away, constant, inexorable movement, in _some_ direction.

Humans (or maybe just humans in a similar demographic to me) value constant movement, constant improvement, so deeply, that I don’t think we ever stop to examine it. Why do we do that? Is it even what we want?

What if constant movement, constant improvement is just distraction from something else? What if telling ourselves that we value forward motion above all else is a way of distracting from something more uncomfortable?

People employed in tech have come to rely on an idea: Everything can be measured. Every interaction a user has with a website or application we’ve built – where their cursor goes, how long they last on any given page. It can all be measured, it can all be tested and compared.

Countless consultants, technologies, entire businesses have sprung up to facilitate the aggregate measure and analysis of this kind of data. How do users respond to a slight change in verbiage? Will users react favorably if we change the order of a checkout flow? Does the color of this button matter?

With enough data, with enough users, with enough measured interactions, the shape that materializes is seems to be the average customer, user, human. The context is often pretty narrow (“How does the average human visiting my site behave?”), but still – people are tirelessly working to distill broad, generic, useful insights into how the average human thinks and behaves from the specific actions of huge swaths of people.

Growing up, I’d classify someone as “eccentric” as a way to put a friendly spin on reality, which is that I thought they were so odd as to deserve to be identified, categorized, as something distinct – outside of the circle of “acceptable social acquaintance”. I’d willingly interact with them, even be a friend, but all this was done in spite of said eccentricity, certainly not because of it.

People who dressed a little weird – not in a way that demanded attention, just off. Or who were a little too into something. Maybe a sport. Maybe religion. Or who couldn’t quite get what was acceptable to like, to dislike.

As an adult, I find myself characterizing it by anything that raises an eyebrow. Or maybe anything that elicits a reaction – a reaction like “That seems like a waste of [time|money|effort]”. “That seems silly”. “I can’t believe they did that”.

I can’t help to start to overlay the same types of big data aggregate analyses onto real life people, people I see and interact with every day. Why we wear what we wear (shoes!), why we eat what we eat, read what we read, what we choose to spend money, time, and effort on. How much of what makes me me is really just manifestation of the average human in my demographic?

Against that background, it feels like the only thing that differentiates, that matters in identifying who a person is is where they deviate from the norm. The scenarios in which one person clicks a link but very few others do. Maybe a person’s eccentricities – the collection of behaviors, actions, reactions – which baffle or even concern their peers and acquaintances, are actually the most meaningful things about them.

Most of us manage to fit the norm most of the time – either because we just do naturally, or because where we don’t, we’re trained to avoid sticking out. As a result, the eccentricities – the rough edges, the pieces that don’t fit – can be identified as being somehow so deeply ingrained in us that we can’t smooth them out, or because we care about them so deeply that we’d prefer to leave them as they are.

My brother was in town just after christmas. We were catching up one afternoon, talking about something. I don’t know what, but it culminated in an epiphany he’d had. About something. Again, I don’t remember. It was important to him, and it had taken a lot of thought, a lot of effort, to get there, and then to present it to me in a way that I could understand and benefit from.

“I guess what I’m saying is: It’s about the journey, not the destination.”

And as he said it, I could see the disappointment in his face. The annoyance. The self loathing. All that effort adequately summarized by a quote we’d both heard a thousand times, and routinely pasted over a stolen picture of a sunset and posted on facebook.

This is not the only time this has happened.

Today I downloaded blinkist, which is an app/service that summarizes books into their main ideas for easy and quick ingestion. I don’t know where I originally heard about Blinkist – I think it’s been quietly infiltrating my subconscious via Instagram ads for weeks, months. Who knows? Anyway, my friend Ben and I were talking about a book, and he said it wasn’t so great, but the main idea was worth pondering, which lead to the idea of trying blinkist. So I did. And it’s great! Unless it’s not.

As I see it, blinkist as a service rests on a few ideas:

Learning is valuable

People are busy

Books are unnecessarily long

I think that much of the population (at least, the population that I’m familiar with) is pretty on board with those 3 ideas. To add another couple that I think are prevalent:

More knowledge makes a person more successful

To read or hear an idea is to understand and benefit from it

With this as a platform, the real bottleneck between a person and success is simply how much information they’re able to consume. And in this paradigm, blinkist makes perfect sense. So does Twitter. So does so much of our social media (and regular media) consumption.

We treat words like magic spells that create understanding. Spells that, upon hearing or reading, magically transfer the intent, the expertise, the passion of the author into the reader. All we have to do is hear the right set of words in the right order, and the rest is fluff.

So we can cut out all the extra. All the fluff that the author put in to stroke his or her ego. If we can just get the author to succinctly announce their idea, their reason for writing, everyone would win.

I think that’s garbage. I think understanding takes time. Maybe very long books are the most useful simply because they force the reader to continue thinking about a single idea for long enough to actually start to get it.

I think communication is terribly ineffective. The alchemy of translating feelings and ideas into words, sentences, paragraphs is risky enough – and then you’re less than halfway there! It has to happen again in the other direction, as the reader reverses the process and attempts to turn words into real understanding. To call it “lossy” is an understatement, bordering on the ridiculous. In such an environment, the only hope author or reader have is to talk a lot. To say the same thing in several different ways, over and over again, in hopes that the reader will eventually work out the pattern – put together the bits and pieces they understand from each attempt, into something close to a whole.

So yes, there’s a lot of content out there. Yes, a lot of it looks interesting. No, I don’t believe the only thing stopping a person from benefitting from all this content at once is that it hasn’t been appropriately summarized, or that we havent heard the bullet points. We’ve all heard the bullet points. The important stuff is what comes in between them.

With all this said, I’m still kind of excited about blinkist. I think its presentation, its message is flawed – but as a way to find out what I might want to learn more about, I still think it sounds pretty interesting.

When I’m famous and this post gets summarized “for busy people”, it will be reduced to “You just have to put in the work”. And somebody will read that, pat themselves on the back for all the time they saved, and move on.

There's a fireplace in my house. A wood burning fireplace. It's not particularly grand. It sits toward the corner of the living room. An important piece to the feel of the room, but not exactly the focal point.

I use it often in the winter – at night while we hang out in the living room on a cold night, or in the afternoon while I sit and read a book.

At our last house, there was a gas fireplace. You flipped a switch and you had fire.

It was easy to use. It was reliable. It was more effective at heating the room – utilizing a built-in blower to push warm air out into the room. It was safer. No sparks or flaming embers could hop out of the flames and onto the carpet, as it was completely enclosed. It was cleaner too. There was no possibility of getting soot from a fire poker on the carpet, or my pants. There was no ash to carelessly knock out.

The gas fireplace was a better product by every measure.

And yet, we rarely used it.

A gas fire burns the same way every time. It never changes. Its reliability – in theory a great advantage – was the thing it got the most wrong.

Apparently I don't want a fireplace as a way to heat a room. The furnace heats the house just fine. It seems I also don't want a fireplace to set the ambiance of a room – thoughtful lighting and interior design can do a fine job of that.

The value of the wood burning fireplace is in all the things that it gets wrong as a useful household appliance. It is the opposite of sterile, reliable, or predictable. I watch logs smoke, light, burn, and turn to ash in ways that I didn't precisely plan out, that may require my attention or intervention. It revels in change, in ephemerality. And I enjoy that.

The utility we find in products, experiences, relationships is often completely unrelated to what is advertised or assumed. It's easy to assume then, at a glance, that there is no utility.

Last week, I went to Spain for work. I don’t travel a lot, but enough to have some habits around air travel. One of those is: I generally fly with a carry on; specifically a soft sided duffel bag. I’m not super anti-checked bag, but I don’t like waiting at baggage claim, I don’t like the risk of losing my bag in transit, and I do like forcing myself to travel with a bag small enough that I can easily get around with it, should I need to carry it for long distances.

And usually this works great. But last week, as I landed in Madrid, groggy from several hours of uncomfortable half-sleep in a chair with jeans on, I gathered my backpack, put my headphones in, and left the plane. Without previously mentioned duffel.

I realized it before I even made it to customs, but it was too late, the plane had closed, and I was definitely not allowed back in to get my bag.

“It will be fine”, I thought. “I’ll find it.”

I found and talked to the flight crew who had just exited the plane, and yes, they had seen my bag, and it would be in baggage claim. Great! So I headed to baggage claim.

Baggage claim did not have my bag. And after some back and forth with the woman working customer service at baggage claim, it was clear that I was not getting my bag today. She suggested I use the airline website to file a lost item report, and they’d be able to ship it to me no problem. I took her at her word, and boarded my next flight.

Over the next couple of days, it became apparent that this was not going to work out. The airline website was all but useless. The few phone numbers I found to try to call someone were wrong, or disconnected. And I shrugged. I’m never going to see that bag again, and that’s fine. Total acceptance. Some clothes, my glasses and toiletries. There’s no significant loss here, just minor inconvenience.

A few days later, we were hanging out late into the evening, after the work was done for the day. Free will vs determinism came up. And, surprisingly, I found myself in the determinist camp. Life just happens, and we’re all just along for the ride. There’s no reason to get too worked up over anything, because it’s all going to work out in the end. The bag was gone. What can you do? There’s no use in wringing hands over it, I’ll just accept it and move on. I’m great at that.

The next day, without my asking, one of my coworkers (undoubtedly annoyed with my response to losing my bag, which, again, was to shrug) took it on himself to figure it out. And he dug in, started calling numbers and asking questions, and got the host at our accommodations involved. Together, they got in touch with the office that had the bag (amazingly, they still had it, literally sitting in the office), and told them when my return flight was, and that I’d be through to pick it up. He showed up later that day and had for me a name, and some very vague directions about where to go.

Monday morning, I land in Madrid, follow the instructions, find the office, and am rewarded with my bag. It’s a miracle! I head through security, take the train to the correct terminal, and walk up to the gate just as the flight is starting to board. And I was excited! The written-off bag was like a Christmas gift – look at all these clothes that I had again!

But for the rest of the journey home, the correlation between our free will conversation and my bag wouldn’t stop nagging at me. I gave up because I let the idea that I can’t make a difference, that an unfeeling universe can’t be reasoned with, and our lot is our lot. I’m glad that I wasn’t too attached to the items in the bag, nor particularly worked up by the minor discomfort of having to figure out what to wear for the week after landing. But the bag was retrievable, and was eventually retrieved because someone else didn’t accept my fate.

What else in my life do I shrug at? What else have I lost, or never attained in the first place because I wasn’t willing to put forth just a little bit of effort, instead relying on the whims of fate land me where they land me? Because I’m too lazy to see that while the universe may be unforgiving, it can be swayed?

The Fyre Festival is all over the internet today. I’m not hip, or particularly young, so I didn’t hear anything about it until today, when it failed, spectacularly. The gist is this: Ja Rule (the rapper who I presumed dead after the first Fast and Furious, where he played an important role) and some entrepreneur teamed up to make a music festival on an island in the Bahamas. Then they did some marketing for it on social media, mostly just attractive women in bikinis wandering around beaches. Then they announced the prices, which were, as you’d expect, not cheap.

And then the time for the actual festival rolled around, and it seems it went… poorly. Nothing was ready – Luxury villas turned out to be FEMA issued disaster tents, many of which apparently blew away. Food was bad. There was no beer. Bahamian customs, at some point stopped allowing people out of the airport, telling them the island was at capacity. The whole thing has now been essentially cancelled, and they’re working to get everyone back off the island.

And honestly, it’s pretty funny. Really funny, actually. Twitter is having a field day, because no one is a safer, easier target to mock than young people with money (bonus points if you already vaguely hate them because #millenials). Also because if you wrote this script as a comedy, it would work, with almost no changes – from Ja Rule being in charge, to the fact that the other guy is apparently a tech entrepreneur, to the terribly dumb promotional videos. And it actually happened. As has been said over and over on twitter, it’s Lord of the Flies with rich millenials. I’m sorry, it is funny.

Anyway, in spite of all that rambling, and the 2 hours I just wasted on twitter following this (seriously, give it a look), it did make me think about more than just laughing at other people’s misfortune (which I’m apparently totally cool with).

This whole deal failed spectacularly – and, by all accounts, it did so because of negligence, laziness, or incompetence on the part of several people in charge of it. However – from here, in my comfortable chair, in my house, where I’m doing nothing, it’s so easy to mock. It’s so easy to listen to the internet and see how this was never going to work, and how every single person involved – from the people who came up with the idea, to the people who were paid to promote it, to the officials on the island, all the way down to the people who paid money to fly on a chartered plane to an island for a music festival – are all morons, and deserved what they got. It’s too easy.

When faced with this kind of situation, deep down, I think most of us are putting ourselves in the shoes of the festival goers, or the organizers, and trying to distance ourselves, to figure out how we’re superior, and we’d never have ended up in the same situation. We see something going terribly and see, in hindsight, all of the things that went wrong, and how stupid the organizers must have been. And we internalize it: “They failed, because they’re dumb. I don’t want to be dumb, I don’t want people to think I’m dumb, I need to avoid this.”

Maybe they were dumb. Clearly the organizers weren’t prepared, and maybe ignored some pretty solid advice and now they’re paying for it. But I worry that when I look at this and other high profile failures, what I hear, what I’m told, what I decide deep down is actually to never try, to never do anything big, because I don’t want people to discover that I’m a moron too. And it’s not just huge public things – it filters all the way down to how I interact with people, how I approach problems at work, how I choose to spend my free time. The message is always “Just don’t end up announcing to the world that you’re a moron, because look at all these average people that have the good sense to know better”. And we listen to it – we assume that the average person (who conveniently is working with the advantage of knowledge of the outcome, and hindsight) would not make dumb mistakes, so we shouldn’t either, lest we advertise our below-averageness.

So here’s my part to help: I’m a moron. I do dumb things. I make mistakes that some people can see coming a mile away, and other people can clearly make sense of (and mock) in hindsight. I’m probably not going to plan an expensive music festival on an island with little to no infrastructure, but I’m sure I’ll do something else obviously stupid, likely on a smaller scale. And it’s ok. I hope I never stop doing dumb things and making mistakes.

Today I was introduced to Herzberg’s motivation-hygiene theory, which attempts to help managers improve morale and productivity by clarifying what makes employees dissatisfied, what makes them satisfied, and how to affect both. Most notably, Herzberg suggests that job dissatisfaction and job satisfaction are distinct, and act independently of each other. In other words, the opposite of dissatisfaction is just a lack of dissatisfaction, and the opposite of satisfaction is not dissatisfaction, but a lack of satisfaction.

For example: When unhappy workers were asked about what made them unhappy, they answered with specifics like salary and company policies. However when asking satisfied employees what made them satisfied, they didn’t answer “I’m fulfilled by our great corporate policies”, or even “I love my salary” – the answers funneled into a different set, things like recognition, growth, and the work itself.

This is interesting in the context of work, and I’m already trying to think how I can use it to my team’s advantage there. But, as is always the case, I think it’s much more interesting in the broader context of life, happiness, motivation.

It’s easy to assume that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are just opposite ends of the same line. But I dislike this idea, and I’ve always disliked this idea, I just haven’t been quite able to put my finger on why. Here’s why:

Happiness is not simply the absence of problems. A life without any problems is not inherently happy, or satisfactory, or fulfilled, it’s just problem free. The set of actions, behaviors, achievements, possessions, relationships, or issues that bring a person fulfillment and happiness are not necessarily the same ones that cause unhappiness when they’re bad, or missing.

Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with afición stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back. The good ones came each year. In Montoya’s room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister. The photographs of bull-fighters Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of bull-fighters who had been without aficion Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the waste-basket. He did not want them around.

We often talked about bulls and bull-fighters. I had stopped at the Montoya for several years. We never talked for very long at a time. It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt. Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls. These men were aficionados. Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full. Montoya introduced me to some of them. They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American. Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have afición. He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it. **When they saw that I had afición, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent,**

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises (p. 115)

This may surprise you, but I’m not particularly into bullfighting. Even so, I like Hemingway’s description of afición.

There are topics, ideas, and activities that I hold dear. I think the things – ideas, activities, whatever – that a person really associates with, really feels, make up who they are.

Sometimes, when you’re talking with someone about something close to you, something important to you, it’s apparent that they get it too. And it’s meaningful – it’s meaningful because as Hemingway says, there’s “No password, not set of questions that could bring it out”. It can’t be faked. And it’s not about talent, or fame, or money. A person could be the best in the world at something, or know the most about a topic, and still not really get it. Not have afición.

So, you know, figure out where your afición lies. It’s probably not bullfighting.

I’m on Instagram a lot. I’m not generally prone to getting sucked into social media – I don’t use twitter much, I can honestly acknowledge that I never leave Facebook happier than when I enter it, so I don’t spend too much time there. But Instagram is a different beast. I enjoy photography – both taking pictures, and looking at them. The fact that it’s really difficult to share links, and large amounts of text are pretty unwieldy makes it pretty great in my book – there’s just so little opportunity for you to share your terrible political opinion with me. People try, sure – but it’s far less common than on other platforms. I don’t follow anyone who posts anything but photography. Very few memes, or political rants – just original content from people I know, or people I find interesting.

But there’s something insidious to Instagram, if you venture much outside people you actually know.

I like the outdoors. I like skiing, hiking, mountain biking, and just general exploration and travel. I’m not alone in this, my tastes are certainly not unique or particularly interesting. So I follow a smattering of popular instagrammers. They’re people with at least a reasonably good eye for photography, who spend a lot of their time doing interesting things.

But there are some red flags: Some people have obvious means of supporting themselves through adventure. Some are obviously just wealthy – family money, business success, whatever. Some are professionals doing something interesting – pro skiers, mountain bikers, etc. Some are photographers or filmmakers, sharing content from their work and adventures.

But some aren’t. They’re just normal-ish people, who like a lot of the same things I like. And this group has the potential to be the most interesting, because they’re the most relatable. But with followers come power, an audience – and any time you’ve got an audience, there’s danger. There’s danger because there’s value in a platform. And with value comes the opportunity for dishonesty.

So my feed is very often full of brand ambassadors, which is fancy talk for “people who get free stuff, and maybe money, because they’ve got an audience”. And that’s fine – I’m not really opposed to it, except that it undermines what made these people so great, so enjoyable to follow along and live vicariously through. Their value, their appeal, is in the honesty and authenticity of whatever they were doing: having an adventure because it’s exactly what they wanted to do, what they were driven to do. Coming up with a plan for something – a trip, and adventure, maybe just a particular photograph – simply because they wanted to. They needed to.

Once there are ulterior motives (money and followers), things aren’t so clear. Motives are tainted. Now there’s the question: are they doing this because it was their choice, their plan, a manifestation of their passions? Or are they doing it because they know people will like it? Because followers mean power? Because a brand will give them money to do it? Is it real, or is it a narrative they’re selling?

And I think this is a broader question, just another facet of the question about shoes: Why do we do what we do? Which motives are real, honest, acceptable, and which are unworthy of praise or attention? Which motives are acceptable to cultivate, and which do we scorn or hide?

I’ve been thinking more about how good employees are willing to quit. It’s a big topic, and one that’s uncomfortable a lot of the time – most of us like to believe, deep down, that we’ve found a career that will last forever, we’ll always be happy, and we’ll never need or want to leave because we’ve got life figured out now, and nothing will ever change.

So we approach professional life with a couple of assumptions:

We should be employed all the time.

Outside of egregious offenses, we should stay at a single employer.

I’d argue that both of these are false – or maybe not false in the sense that the opposite is true (That people should actively seek unemployment, and should hop from job to job for no reason), just means that these assumptions are invalid.

Any relationship works best when all parties are on equal footing. By accepting either or both of these assumptions, the employee starts at a disadvantage – assuming that they should always be employed (as opposed to self employed, or, you know, bummin’ around) and that leaving a job requires valid cause means at our most basic, we assume we need an employer. This taints the relationship from the start.

Working under these assumptions, the question to ask is “Why should I leave”? I think the correct question to ask is “Why should I stay”?

Obligation is the wrong reason to do almost anything, and assuming that the default is to stay in a job – to stay at an employer because you’ve been there for a while, because you owe them something, etc – is obligation. It doesn’t get the best work out of anyone, and it breeds resentment, left unchecked.

The beautiful thing is that a shift in perspective here – going from the vague feelings of obligation and guilt that your job conjures because you think you’re supposed to be there, to the acknowledgement that you’re there for a reason: Maybe you really enjoy the work, or the people you work with, or you’re learning a lot, or maybe you just need the money (which is a completely valid reason to stay at a job) – can change your attitude completely, and clarify in your own head what you’re doing.

Alternatively, maybe you realize that there is no good reason to stay – that you really are just staying out of obligation, or because your mom likes to tell her friends that you’re important because of your title. In which case, you can acknowledge that it’s perfectly acceptable to go figure something else out. You don’t need a boss who sexually harasses you, or a job offer for twice as much money elsewhere – you just need an acknowledgement that there’s no good reason to stay.

Figure out why you do what you do. It’s important. It takes a lot of your time, and you only have so much. You owe it to yourself to be honest about why you’re spending it the way you are.